Mar 7, 2026 06:53 PM
https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/tw...out-cancer
INTRO: In December 2025, researchers led by Yazan Alwadi at Harvard’s T.H Chan School of Public Health published a paper in Environmental Health that claimed to find that cancer incidence increased for people living closer to nuclear power plants in Massachusetts. Just this past week, the same researchers published an expanded nationwide study claiming a similar result -- this time looking at cancer mortality rates, rather than incidence -- in Nature Communications.
If these findings were true, the research would support the fringe idea that nuclear power is actively harmful to the general population even without a catastrophic failure, which has not been confirmed by past research. Anti-nuclear activists would no longer need to point to the possible risk of meltdowns; they can simply point to increased cancer risks just from living close to a plant.
That is an extraordinary claim. But the studies’ design cannot support that claim.
The problem is not that the authors found a statistical pattern. The problem is that their research design cannot determine whether proximity to a nuclear plant is the cause of that pattern. It can only show that cancer rates vary geographically and that cancer detection rates have increased over the past few decades, which we already know.
The two papers make the fundamental mistake of confusing correlation with causation.... (MORE - details)
INTRO: In December 2025, researchers led by Yazan Alwadi at Harvard’s T.H Chan School of Public Health published a paper in Environmental Health that claimed to find that cancer incidence increased for people living closer to nuclear power plants in Massachusetts. Just this past week, the same researchers published an expanded nationwide study claiming a similar result -- this time looking at cancer mortality rates, rather than incidence -- in Nature Communications.
If these findings were true, the research would support the fringe idea that nuclear power is actively harmful to the general population even without a catastrophic failure, which has not been confirmed by past research. Anti-nuclear activists would no longer need to point to the possible risk of meltdowns; they can simply point to increased cancer risks just from living close to a plant.
That is an extraordinary claim. But the studies’ design cannot support that claim.
The problem is not that the authors found a statistical pattern. The problem is that their research design cannot determine whether proximity to a nuclear plant is the cause of that pattern. It can only show that cancer rates vary geographically and that cancer detection rates have increased over the past few decades, which we already know.
The two papers make the fundamental mistake of confusing correlation with causation.... (MORE - details)